Letter R, /r/

Letter R

Teaching The Letter R

Ask your child to curl their tongue upwards, but not to touch the roof of their mouth. Tell them to make the shape of a bowl with their tongue. To make the letter R sound, they will need to force the air out of their mouth and nose and make a roaring sound.

Your child may be familiar with these words that start with R:

Run

Rabbit

Ring

Rest

Real

Roll

To teach the letter R successfully to your child you will need to be consistent. You can buy letter R books online or from stores, and if you do this be sure to get those that have nursery rhymes and funny pictures, as this will help your child to learn. You can check out the library for these books as well. You will need to be patient with your child when they are learning, as they will probably make some mistakes.

Spell out the letters of your child’s name if it has an R in it. Point out to them where the letter R appears. If they do not have an R in their name, then you can try and find names that start with R from family members or characters from the TV that your toddler will recognize. If you can find these names, then spell them out using toy letters so that your child can see the letter R.

Here are some names that begin with R that your child may already recognize:

Ray

Roy

Ron

Raine

Rebecca

Rachel

As your child develops you can tell them about these more challenging names beginning with R:

Reginald

Royston

Richard

Rayleigh

Rhonda

Rochelle

Learning The Letter R Should Be Fun For Your Child

When your child is young, you want to link learning with fun. This way your child will be more eager to learn. Be sure to have fun teaching the letter R. There are a number of ways that you can do this, and there are some good examples later on in this article. Start with letter R worksheets. These are available online, and be sure to choose worksheets that have funny illustrations to make them more interesting for your child.

Another fun way to learn is through the learning and singing of letter R songs. There are many of these songs around, and your child will love it if you learn the songs and sing them together. You can find letter R videos too, which will be entertaining for your toddler. A lot of the R songs are in video format, and you can find a good example of this below.

Always take the time out to sing the letter R song together with your child. They will absolutely love the experience, and will not forget it in a hurry. The same goes for watching videos together. You will probably find that your child will want to sing the songs with you repeatedly, so make sure that you do that.

Here Are More Letter R Activities For Preschool Children That Are Good Fun

Don’t just confine yourself to books, songs, videos and worksheets. There are other fun letter R activities for your child and you can start with:

Finding Animals That Start With The Letter R

Looking for animals that begin with the letter R will be great fun, because most kids really like animals. There are a few of these, and it is possible that your child already knows rabbit, reindeer and rhinoceros. There are others that you can tell them about such as ram, rat, rattlesnake, raven, raccoon, roadrunner and rook. Show pictures of the animals and spell out their names, so your child can see they all start with R.

Change this up a bit by looking for animals that have the letter R in their name but not at the start. Some easy ones are shark, deer, bird, bear, crocodile, leopard, tortoise, dragonfly, frog, giraffe, gorilla, badger, kangaroo, lizard and parrot. Again spell out the letters so that your toddler can see the letter R and show pictures of these animals.

Look Around The Home For Things That Start With The Letter R

This is a fun activity that is easy to do. There should be quite a few things that begin with R that you have at home. If you are stuck on this think about ruler, radio, rain coat, raisins, rake, raspberries, rattle, ravioli, relish, rice, ring, robot, roller skates, rolling pin and rug. Show your child these items, and write out the letters to show them that all of the words begin with R.

Time now to think about other R words that your toddler may have heard other members of your family say, or even heard them on TV. This could be run, rain, red, rush, rest, relax, remember, rubber, raw, reading, remove, rust, rainbow, right, rare, roll and road. Show them real life examples here (you can run or pretend to run) or use pictures to explain the meaning of the words. And don’t forget to spell all of the letters out by writing or using toy letters.

Change this again to find words with R in them that exclude words starting with R. There are thousands of these words and it should not be difficult to do this. Make it easy to start with by using words like car, far, ear, tear, fire, wire, tire, wear, for, four, pour, more, learn, start, dart, part and corn. Explain any words that your child doesn’t know by using pictures or real life examples. Always spell the words out so that your child can see where the letter R occurs.

Don’t stop when you are outside with your toddler. Always be on the lookout to find more R words for kids. When you are travelling you can look for street signs that have R in them. You can do this on the bus, on the train or in the car. In stores and other places you can look for R words too. Make a note of the words you discover, so you can spell them out later to your child.

Like all letters of the alphabet, the letter R can be written in two formats. These are the big letter R (capital letter R) and the small letter R (lowercase letter R). Your child needs to know about these two formats and why they are different. You can explain that a capital letter is always used for a person’s name.

There are many pictures of the letter R in the two formats online, which you can then print out for your child. Get them to trace each format so they become familiar with it. They will need to know how to write these two formats in the future so this will be good practice.

Teach Your Child Phonics And They Will Be A Good Reader

It has been proven that kids that learn how to read by phonics instruction become better readers than those that learn using other methods. The letter R phonics need to be learned, as do all of the other letters. These unique sounds, or phonemes, are one of the first things that your child should master for their reading development. More information about the letter R sounds can be found below.

English Alphabet LETTER R SOUNDS:

R /r/:

The 18th letter in the alphabet is R and it is a voiced consonant that is pronounced by using the vocal cords. The letter sound for R is “Ar” but still written as /r/. The R sound is sometimes mistakenly taught as “ruh” but should never be spoken that way to your child.

Observing how you make the proper /r/ sound is very interesting because the front of the tongue never actually touches anything. The sound is made when your tongue pulls back and rises slightly in the mouth. At the same time the sides of the tongue touch the inside of the upper molars. The mouth rounds slightly to produce the final sound.

Avoid saying the words as “Ruh” only use the correct “Ar” sound.

Examples:

RUN: /r/ /u/ /n/

ROB: /r/ /o/ /b/

RIB: /r/ /i/ /b/

Exercises for /r/

Before you begin, print a piece of paper for the Letter R/r/

Also print a piece of paper with the following words for R:
RUN
RACK
FROG
DRUM
RAIN
RIGHT

Show your child the Letter on the index card or paper and repeat the letter sound several times: Ris pronounced “Ar” not “Ruh”

Take time with your child to be sure the /r/ sound is pronounced correctly

Listen carefully as your child repeats the sound after you

Practice stretching the sound and say /r/ to your child

Ask your child if different words have the /r/ sound and wait to see the response. Always repeat the word using the letter sound to be sure your child knows the sound

Continue to repeat other short sound I words such as RATE, RING, ROBE, RUST

Finalize the lesson by asking your child what sound the R makes

Get Expert Help Teaching Your Child To Read

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In the next section you will learn how to teach your child about the letter S to your child so please click here.